Channel Mastery Podcast, Episode #108: The Shaping and Evolution of Mountain Bike Racing ​ and Events, A Tribute to Ed Zink www.channelmastery.com Kristin: Welcome back everybody to another episode of the Channel Mastery podcast. This is a very special episode today in honor of Ed Zink. I am a 25-year Durango, Colorado resident, and Ed passed on October 11th from complications of a heart attack. Too young. I have the honor today of having Gaige Sippy, who is the current Director of the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic, another longtime Durango resident, and Ned Overend, world champ mountain bike racer of the cross country variety and many other accolades. I know many of you know Ned. He is also a sports marketing and product development support person at Specialized. Hopefully I introduced you correctly, Ned, because you have a lot of titles. Ned Overend: Those work. Kristin: Okay, great. Welcome to both of you. I'm so grateful to have you on the show here today to talk about Mountain Bike Specialists, to talk about how Ed Zink created community and created massive impact through community to really grow cycling, mountain biking, trail advocacy, so many things. This is really just an episode to honor an incredible independent bicycle dealer in Ed Zink, And that was only one thing that he accomplished, but it is a central hub of, I think, the wheel of all of the impact that he created. With that, I wanted to just turn the microphone over to Gaige and to Ned to each individually give their background on who they are, when they met Ed and what capacity they shared part of their life with Ed. Let's start with you, Gaige. Gaige Sippy: My relationship with Ed all formalized around the 1990 World Championships. I was a young guy that lived in New Mexico that wanted to race bikes. I wanted to be Ned Overend. I made my way to Durango, first time in 1989, I'd been here skiing, but I came in 1989 to ride the Iron Horse and was in awe of the event. I was a Cat-4 road racer and a expert-level mountain bike racer and really liked the Iron Horse. Then lo and behold, the world championships were going to be held here in 1990, so I came and I took part that weekend in various capacities and watched Ned win the worlds and took in the whole scene. I did not meet Ed Zink as part of the '90 worlds. The strange circumstance that surrounds that whole thing is that same weekend, my mother and father came to Durango and wanted to buy a retirement piece of property. When I went back to college and my mom and dad returned back to Albuquerque and notified me they'd bought a home in Durango and I should come up and visit at Thanksgiving. I did, and the first morning I was there, I call this the two cowboys walk up to a fence story. Two cowboys literally walked up to a fence and one of them, younger of the two cowboys, looked over the fence and saw my mountain bike sitting there and said, "You'd be interested in going for a mountain bike ride?" I said, "Sure, I'd love to." I rode up the hill with this guy that seemed to know a lot about the bike thing, I told him how great the 1990 worlds was and I figured out right then, it was Ed Zink. Kristin: That's awesome. Gaige Sippy: Yeah, he became my mom and dad's neighbor, so while on that ride, Ed asked me if I ever thought about living in Durango. Of course, I said, " Just trying to figure out how quickly that can happen." He invited me to call John Glover at Mountain Bike Specialists, which was actually The Outdoorsman back then. The following summer, summer of '91, I came up and went to work at The Outdoorsman at the time, Ruby Zink, Ed's mother, was still working there and running the show to some extent. Ed was there as well, and I started that and I worked that summer and then I graduated college and came back and continued on at Mountain Bike Specialists. At that point, I was there when we took the animals off the wall and we just became a bike shop. Kristin: I love it. Gaige Sippy: That was a bit of a watershed moment for the family and for the town really. Then that started my relationship with Ed, and then I left Durango for a period of time, and when I came back in the early 2000s, I started helping with the Iron Horse more at a volunteer level, and then at one point Ed approached me with Kendra Holmes, who was the director at the time of the Iron Horse, and asked me if I'd be willing to take over for Kendra. She was departing. Little did I know, that would turn into what it has turned into. I had a 29-year relationship with Ed, and he's my nextdoor neighbor. I live on that same property now that my parents originally bought. He's been my neighbor, my mentor. He's been a lot of things me. I've enjoyed navigating things, and it's just been an incredible...You tend to reflect on these things when someone passes and you really look back at all the things that have happened, but it changed my life dramatically. I think Ned's probably going to say the same thing, but I think both of us were impacted by Ed Zink in a way that neither one of us necessarily thought we were going to be and the path that took both of us on different paths, but paths that changed my life forever and my family's life forever, to be honest. That's kind of my story of how I came to be with Ed Zink and our relationship. Kristin: That's great. Thank you so much for sharing. How about you Ned Overend? Can you share your story as well? Channel Mastery Podcast Episode #108: Gaige Sippy and Ned Overend Page 2 of 17 www.channelmastery.com email: [email protected] ​ ​ Ned Overend: Similar to Gaige, it's a thread that you'll hear a lot about Ed. He takes a lot of people under his wing. He mentors a lot of people, and he did me as well. I moved to Durango in 1980 and was a car mechanic and also got into some running and then got into some riding, and I decided to try and become a professional racer. I decided, okay, I have to stop working as a car mechanic if I want to try and be a professional racer. I had met Ed when I'd started racing in '82, road racing at the Iron Horse. He said, "Well, work at the shop and we'll help you, give you the time you need and stuff and support to try and become a professional racer." From that early experience working at the store, which is invaluable, because all the way up to my current job working at Specialized, it is so valuable to actually spend time working in a store, especially a successful store, a store that's been thriving for, well, 50 years now. Zink kind of took me under his wing, and I know that he was helping me negotiate with different teams to get in the '83 Coors Classic, which was the first real international road race that I'd done, and we were talking with Michael Fatka of the Raleigh team that had Andy Hampsten on it, Thurlow Rogers, Steve Tilford. It's about the time that I first met Steve Tilford too. But Zink was an early adopter or understood very early how big mountain biking was going to be. He had the experience of promoting races with the Iron Horse Classic, the road race, and he quickly jumped on mountain bike racing. He promoted the '86 and '87 NORBA {National Off Road Bicycle Association} nationals, and I think I won both of those races. So he also promoted the 1990 worlds, which I won. He promoted a lot of races that I won, and I like to think that we kind of had a partnership in promoting mountain biking in Durango. There's a lot of different ways that Ed helped me, but from the very beginning ... It's interesting. As I do the math, he was only six or seven years older than I am, but I assumed, and especially from early on, that he was older than me, because the guy had so much experience and so much wisdom. Kristin: And vision, for sure. These are just fantastic jumping off points that I would love to dive in on. Let's start by talking about the Mountain Bike Specialists, and then I'd love to get more into the events and how just the interconnection of his vision was around that. Let's go back to what you said, Gaige, about you were there the day they took the animals off the wall. I'm going to be including some images on the podcast notes page and I know that Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, which is a co-producer of this episode, will also have some of these images of Mountain Bike Specialists up on their site and on their Instagram, et cetera, after the show is published.